As Europe currently faces one of the worst energy crises in its history, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear capacity will be shut down on Friday, December 31. The withdrawal of three nuclear reactors out of six still in operation comes in the midst of a European energy crisis fueled by the recent resurgence of geopolitical tensions between the main supplier of gas, Russia, and its customers.
The blocks located in the German villages of Brokdorf, Grohnde and Gundremmingen will stop operating in 2022. The whole represents around 4 gigawatt hours of installed power, or the equivalent of a thousand wind turbines. At the end of 2022, it will be the turn of the last three power plants in the country, Neckarwestheim (south), Isar 2 (south) and Emsland (north), with here too a capacity of around 4 GW withdrawn from the network.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 convinced former Chancellor Angela Merkel in a few days to initiate the abandonment of nuclear power in Germany.
Despite the withdrawal of energy that still accounted for around 11% of the electricity generated in 2020, “security of supply in Germany remains guaranteed”, said Robert Habeck, Green Minister for the Economy and Climate Protection on Tuesday. Until renewable energies completely fill this gap, Germany supplies itself on a massive scale with fossil fuels, particularly gas.
This comes at a price. European gas prices continue to soar, in the wake of geopolitical tensions with Russia, the main supplier to Europe. Sebastian Herold, professor of energy policy at the University of Darmstadt, said the end of nuclear power in Germany is expected to push prices up even further. “In the long term, we hope that the increase in renewables will balance things out, but this will not be the case in the short term. “Germany should “remain more dependent on natural gas overall, at least in the short term, and therefore also a little more dependent on Russia”.
Another setback: the shutdown of nuclear power plants removes a key source of low-carbon energy in a country where emissions are on the rise. The use of fossil fuels to compensate is expected to increase CO2 emissions by “up to about 40 million tonnes” per year, according to the Berlin institute DIW.